


The Secrets of Catherine Tilney

by RobberBaroness



Category: Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Genre: Bittersweet, F/M, Ghosts, Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22169560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/pseuds/RobberBaroness
Summary: It is only natural for a heroine to have a ghostly lover.
Relationships: Catherine Morland/Henry Tilney
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	The Secrets of Catherine Tilney

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Major](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/gifts).



There is a secret ghosts don’t want you to know- they’re prone to theatrical settings. Once, Catherine had worried over skeletons behind fictional doors and laundry lists hidden within chests; now she left halls deliberately unswept so that cobwebs might emerge, took to hiding her late husband’s possessions in suspicious places, and ordered all her gowns replaced with ones in black with no intention of ever leaving her mourning period. Eleanor came by to pay her respects and thought her understandably driven eccentric with grief; Frederick came by to seduce his own brother’s widow, and Catherine had quietly but firmly shut the door in his face.

(Perhaps she should have invited him in and given him a good fright. He would have deserved it.)

Under normal circumstances it would have pained Catherine to think she was keeping her beloved from passing on to heaven, but when she had sat by Henry’s sickbed, he had promised that if there was a way he could be with her beyond the veil of death, he would find it. All she was doing was taking him at his word.

Late at night, when the moon was high and the candlelight flickered, she would lie in bed with one of the books they had shared and wait. Dressed in a flimsy black nightgown, the room decorated with the most morbid accoutrements she could purchase, Catherine waited to hear her lover’s footsteps on the floor.

“My demon lover,” she had said the first time he came, but she knew that Henry Tilney was no demon. Only a ghost with a theatrical sensibility.

A few of the local girls with similar hobbies to Catherine’s had concluded that the widow was being preyed upon by a vampire. Indeed, her hours were becoming increasingly nocturnal, and her skin was growing paler from lack of sunlight. But she did not look withering or deathly. She glowed.

“A fine state we’re in,” Henry told her one night. “You don’t suppose it would all be this complicated if you’d stuck to reading poetry and morally improving essays?”

And she had laughed and kissed his cold lips and decided she must read him the latest Mary Anne Radcliffe work...just as soon as they’d taken care of more personal business.

**Author's Note:**

> The soundtrack to this story is "Ghost Story" by Charming Disaster.


End file.
